The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

War is a way of shattering to pieces… materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and… too intelligent.